On the streets or in a house?

Pye Jakobsson was enjoying the last of the evening sun on her patio in Tyresö. ‘They’ve won,’ she said, ‘and I’ve lost. I’ll be leaving the country at the end of the month, and going to live somewhere in southern Europe where the laws are different.’ Jakobsson, 48, is spokesperson for the Rose Alliance, a Swedish organisation founded in 2003 to defend sex workers. (She uses the term ‘because as soon as you are paid for an activity, it’s work.’) To continue working in prostitution in Sweden today means even greater exposure to the risks of a clandestine existence, she says.

In 1998 the government decided to penalise prostitutes’ clients, in the name of principles that emerged in the 1970s and still unite Swedish society. One of the most important is gender equality, which legislators decided was an idea incompatible with sex for money, since that introduces an element of coercion: it gives (mostly male) clients who pay for sexual services power over (mostly female) sellers. In view of this imbalance, parliament passed a law (in force from January 1999) forcing clients to change their behaviour and effectively driving prostitutes into other work.

Sweden has other highly repressive laws. A private landlord or hotel owner cannot rent accommodation to a prostitute without being accused of procuring. Jakobsson says the 1999 law is clearly inspired by Lutheranism: ‘People still think sex workers are wicked women who steal men from their wives.’ Her arguments, which echo the usual criticisms of abolitionism, are a direct challenge to the authorities.

Gunilla Ekberg, an expert on prostitution and trafficking, collaborated in the formulation of the law. She says: ‘Religion has nothing to do with it. But we do have principles based on ethics. If you want a society where men and women have the same opportunities and the same rights, you need to eradicate the violence that men inflict on women.’